In his final State of the Union message sent to Congress this week, President Buchanan at long last waded into the secession crisis, and in the manner of a cranky grandfather who has found a pleasant afternoon nap spoiled by a household of fractious children, he has admonished the squabbling imps to behave. And in the Solomonic way elders have of blaming everyone, he found one side guilty of rudely instigating the conflict, and the other guilty of overreaction.

Stop poking your brother, Buchanan told the North. “The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects . . . . [T]he incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar.” Presumably he was speaking of the family altar in the plantation house, not the one in the slave quarters.

Stop whining, Buchanan told the South, it’s only a poke. “The election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union. This is more especially true if his election has been effected by a mere plurality, and not a majority of the people” — Come on, Lincoln didn’t even get 40 percent of the vote! — “and has resulted from transient and temporary causes which may probably never again occur. After all, he is no more than the chief executive officer of the Government . . . His province is not to make but to execute the laws. And it is a remarkable fact in our history that, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of the antislavery party, no single act has ever passed Congress . . . impairing in the slightest degree the rights of the South to their property in slaves; and . . . judging from present indications, that no probability exists of the passage of such an act by a majority of both Houses, either in the present or the next Congress.”

In other words, you in the North caused this problem, and you in the South don’t have a problem.

Everyone may have wished that Grandpop would have gone back to bed at this point, but instead he continued, albeit in a decidedly dreamy way. “How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! . . . All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. For this the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more fight to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil.”

Library of CongressJames Buchanan

Buchanan might have done his successor a world of good at this moment by mentioning that Lincoln has said that he has no intention of trying to prevent any state from managing its domestic institutions in its own way, but perhaps the pro-slavery Democrat from Pennsylvania doesn’t really believe the anti-slavery Republican from Illinois is being entirely candid in this claim. Or, if he is being candid about his intentions, he isn’t being candid about his ability to control the abolitionist fervor of his supporters, who continue their denunciations of slavery. (And nothing irritates the drowsy Buchanan like those denunciations! “For five and twenty years the agitation . . . against slavery has been incessant. In 1835 pictorial handbills and inflammatory appeals were circulated extensively throughout the South of a character to excite the passions of the slaves, and, in the language of General Jackson, ‘to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war.'”) Of course, one might wonder how seeing pictorial images of persons in bondage being whipped stimulate a person to insurrection, if witnessing such events — or being a victim of them — has not.

Thankfully, the whole address did not consist of wishful thinking and finger-pointing. Well, you got me up now, Grandpop seemingly concluded, I may as well do some work. Perhaps he realized that although his time in office would last a mere three months more, three months is still ample time to destroy the republic. The president summoned all of his remaining executive authority and addressed the question of secession.

Ignoring the hotheads hell-bent on secession, Buchanan spoke to the cooler-headed, more legalistic gentlemen who like to contend that secession is a legitimate way of ending what had always been a voluntary association. This can’t be so, the president said, for otherwise the union would be “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks which cost our forefathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish.”

Such a notion, the president forthrightly declared, “is wholly inconsistent with the history as well as the character of the Federal Constitution.” To prove his point, Buchanan then went through the venerable document, showing that in Article after Article, on matters involving commerce, foreign relations, and more, the individual states ceded their authority to the central government for the purposes of forming a more perfect union. “The framers [of the Constitution] never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they at its creation guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution. It was not intended by its framers to be the baseless fabric of a vision, which at the touch of the enchanter would vanish into thin air, but a substantial and mighty fabric, capable of resisting the slow decay of time and of defying the storms of ages . . . [T]hey did not fear, nor had they any reason to imagine, that the Constitution would ever be so interpreted as to enable any State by her own act, and without the consent of her sister States, to discharge her people from all or any of their federal obligations.” Secession, Buchanan declared, “is neither more nor less than revolution.”

Had Buchanan ended there with a firm and straightforward declaration against secession, he might have provided a figure of strength that his fellow citizens, especially the pro-unionists of the upper south, could rally around. Alas, moments after decrying the absurdity of a Constitution that provided the means of its own destruction, he embraced the absurdity of a Constitution that lacked the means of its own preservation.

In an exhibition of unadulterated dithering, the chief executive acknowledged that he had sworn a solemn oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. “But what if the performance of this duty, in whole or in part, has been rendered impracticable by events over which he could have exercised no control?” Pointing to the resignations of virtually the whole cadre of federal officials in South Carolina, Buchanan said the “whole machinery of the Federal government . . . has been demolished, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace it.” In other words, for want of U.S. attorney in Charleston, the chief executive is impotent.

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Then the president completed the circle. Not only am I helpless, so is Congress. “Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy? . . . After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the Federal Government.” He called upon the states to pass a set of constitutional amendments that would affirm the legal existence of slavery, a solution that he believed would set the entire matter to rest.

The president is enormously pleased with his formulations, so much so that he ordered a copy hand-carried to Governor Gist of South Carolina, confident that he had hit upon a combination of words that would palliate the crisis. In fact, he has pleased no one. The South didn’t like being told that secession was wrong, and the North didn’t like being told that saying slavery is wrong was wrong.

But the far greater problem is the impression of the president’s overall ineffectiveness. The Philadelphia North American said, “With much soundness of argument we have singular inadequacy of results.’’ The Cincinnati Enquirer said, “Seldom have we known so strong an argument come to so lame and impotent a conclusion.” Senator William Seward of New York — still assumed to be Lincoln’s choice to become secretary of state — archly summarized the president’s remarks by saying “No state has the right to secede unless it wishes to, and it is the president’s duty to enforce the laws, unless somebody opposes him.” But at least some people saw Buchanan’s bold assertion of his own impotence and reached a firm conclusion. “There will be no war,” said Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia, taking a cool-eyed measure of the administration’s lack of resolve. “In less than 12 months, a Southern Confederacy will be formed, and it will be the most successful government on earth.”

Sources: To learn more about these events, please see “Lincoln and the Decision for War,” by Russell McClintock (The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and “The Road to Disunion Vol. II: Secessionist Triumphant, by William W. Freehling” (Oxford University Press, 2007).

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.